Business this week

The European Commission fined five banks €1.7 billion ($2.3 billion) in total for participating in cartels to fix the Euribor and the Yen LIBOR. It is the latest transgression by bankers to rig interest-rate benchmarks. Deutsche Bank took part in both cartels and was given a €725m penalty, as did Royal Bank of Scotland, which was fined €391m. Société Générale will pay €446m for participating in the Euribor cartel; JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup received lesser fines. Barclays and UBS were implicated but not fined because they told authorities about the practice. Otherwise the commission would have hit UBS with a €2.5 billion penalty and Barclays with a €690m one. See article

Jet setters

After a lengthy investigation French magistrates ordered a trial for alleged insider trading at EADS, the parent company of Airbus. Daimler, a German carmaker, and Lagardère, a French media conglomerate, are charged with gaining sensitive information about Airbus’s A380 super-jumbo before selling shares in 2006; they were the biggest investors in EADS when it was created in 2000. Seven former and current executives at EADS will also stand trial, including Noël Forgeard, who resigned as co-chief executive in 2006.

The Federal Reserve approved revised capital plans from JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. It had asked the banks to fix weaknesses in their proposals and resubmit them. Both will now be able to proceed with share buy-backs and increase shareholder dividends if they wish.

China said it was lifting a ban on IPOs, which it imposed in October 2012. New rules issued by the securities regulator were broadly welcomed; the regulator still holds a veto over which companies can list, but underwriters have been given more flexibility for pricing and allocating shares.

The Chinese government issued licences to China Mobile and two smaller wireless providers to operate on the country’s new 4G network. The long-awaited news is a boon to telecoms-equipment makers, not least Apple, which is expected to offer the iPhone to China Mobile’s more than 700m subscribers. See article

The banks that underwrote Twitter’s IPO issued reports that on average forecast only a slight rise in the microblogging site’s share price over the next 12 months. Twitter set its IPO last month at $26 a share; the price surged on the first day of trading but has trundled along at around $42 since then.

The price of gold fell sharply again in November, by 6%, partly because investors transferred assets into rising stockmarkets. The price of the precious metal may well be lower at the end of 2013 than it was at the start, which would be the first annual drop in 13 years.

Brazil’s economy contracted by 0.5% in the third quarter compared with the previous three months, the worst performance in five years. The country is heading for growth of less than 3% in 2013, well below the 4.5% that the government forecast earlier this year. Meanwhile, the official growth forecast in Russia, another economically challenged BRIC country, was revised down again. GDP is now expected to expand by 1.4% this year and 2.5% next. See article

A truly global business

ThyssenKrupp sold its steel-processing factory in Alabama to a joint venture owned by ArcelorMittal and Nippon Steel. The plant supplies America’s carmakers (which reported robust sales last month). ThyssenKrupp, which is based in Germany, opened the factory three years ago, relying on imported raw steel from Brazil, but costs surged, in part because of a strong real. The new owners of the Alabama works will keep costs down through a shortened supply chain that obtains raw steel from elsewhere in the United States and Mexico.

Rio Tinto and Vale became the latest mining companies to slash capital-spending plans. Rio is cutting deeper than its rivals, curbing spending from about $14 billion this year to $8 billion in 2015, as it reduces the debt it piled up during the commodity boom. Rio’s share price is about 13% below its peak this year, in February.

Amazon took full advantage of the Thanksgiving weekend to publicise its research project to deliver goods by aerial drone, though Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s boss, admitted this was some years off. With all the regulatory concerns over privacy and noise, sceptics contend that the online retailer’s plan will never fly. See article

The Bollywood bird

After two aborted attempts at Cape Canaveral, SpaceX launched its first commercial satellite. The private company has blasted into space before, taking cargo for NASA to the International Space Station. This mission reached 80,000km at its apogee, a fifth of the average distance to the Moon, to deliver a geostationary satellite that will broadcast programmes to South Asia.